LOUISVILLE — Six satellites will launch from Florida’s coast next week, marking the first time a U.S.-based company has built small satellites in assembly-line fashion — a concept that is helping to change the space-industry paradigm.

Large space budgets have dwindled and customer patience for production delays has waned in recent years, requiring America to re-imagine the way it does space.

Louisville-based Sierra Nevada Corp.’s Space Systems saw the tectonic shifts in the industry and concocted a plan in 2008 to make what has traditionally been a slow, costly process a more nimble, lean way of making satellites.

The company designed and built these six spacecraft, scheduled to launch June 11, for its customer ORBCOMM’s Generation 2 constellation. The remaining 11 satellites in the system are expected to launch by the end of the year.

Production happened from start to finish in a revamped facility that can be easily reconfigured. They’ve streamlined by moving all testing and assembly in-house.

“It’s bringing a new way of thinking to space,” said Mark Sirangelo, head of Space Systems. “There are companies all over the world doing this, but we are probably ahead of them right now.”

The 17-satellite constellation will replace ORBCOMM’s existing decade-old system with 12 times the bandwidth. The birds will cover the entire planet, making a full lap about every 90 minutes.

“That’s the shift that’s happening in space: We are going from a mainframe to a desktop to a network,” Sirangelo said.

These particular satellites are listening with high-powered sensors for signals from hundreds of thousands of transmitters that ORBCOMM sells and profits from.

Sirangelo compared his company’s satellites to Apple’s iPad and compared its customers, such as ORBCOMM, to app developers.

Maritime, trucking and cargo industries are a few examples of the users buying and downloading the tracking data from ORBCOMM.

But Sierra Nevada hopes this will be just the first of many uses for its assembly-line satellites.

“These are platforms that are meant to be interchangeable,” Sirangelo said. “We hope this spurs other companies to come up with applications here in Colorado.”

This approach is on par with a larger trend — known by the wonky word disagreggation — that was discussed at length last month during the 30th annual Space Symposium in Colorado Springs.

Bill Gattle, vice president of national systems for Florida-based Harris Corp., shed some light on this trend when explaining his company’s decision to partner with satellite startup OmniEarth.

He said there is a general move toward large constellations of low-cost satellites that are all mapping or somehow connecting disparate parts of the world, with the ultimate goal of selling that information to users.

Sierra Nevada may be the only U.S. company with an assembly line for the washing machine-size satellites, but several others build nanosats the size of toasters.

“The market is flooding with sensors,” Gattle said. “There are a million micro markets, and we are all trying to figure it out. … Most of us are looking at how to scale it.”

A major criticism of the way aerospace has traditionally operated is the steep cost related to the highly sensitive nature of the equipment.

But after winning the ORBCOMM contract six years ago, a team at Sierra Nevada began experimenting with ways to save time and ultimately lower the cost of building satellites.

“All the tests happen in this building,” Sirangelo said, referring to the 40,000-square-foot manufacturing facility located in a Louisville business park.

This, he said, allows Sierra Nevada to save ”
time, money, risk, even insurance to truck satellites to another facility for testing.”

The team created unique ways to conduct thermal cycling, vacuum, light and vibration tests all in an open space that could be rearranged for a new project with different needs.

The clean rooms were built modularly so that different classes of tests can occur simultaneously.

“We do it in a fraction of the time, at a fraction of the cost,” Sirangelo said. “Instead of taking two years, it’s taking four to five months to build a satellite.”

The in-house system took innovation and experimentation.

A Sierra Nevada team member discovered that really powerful movie-set lights, when placed at the right distance, produce the same level of light stress as expensive rooms solely dedicated to this test.

As for quality, Sierra Nevada has facilities that other mid-size companies don’t.

The business unit based in Louisville has three major areas of work: its high-profile Dream Chaser vehicle, its satellite business, and what’s called components and subsystems.

“But now (Sierra Nevada) can afford to apply that quality assurance to its leaner business,” Sirangelo said, explaining the quality assurance acts like an independent monitor, auditing the level of work on every piece of equipment built in the facility.

Kristen Leigh Painter was a former business reporter who focused on airlines and aerospace coverage. She joined The Post in September 2011 and departed for the Minneapolis Star-Tribune in August 2014. She graduated from the University of Colorado Boulder with a master's in journalism after earning a bachelor's in history from the University of Wisconsin La Crosse.

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